Understanding of modal and aspectual verbal periphrasis in samples of Chinese students of Spanish

Comprensión de las perífrasis verbales modales y aspectuales en muestras de estudiantes chinos de español

Abstract

This article presents the partial results of an investigation that studies a complicated topic on the acquisition of Spanish as a foreign language or second language: the understanding of verbal periphrasis. Given the linguistic distance between Spanish and Mandarin Chinese and the complexity of theses units, it is difficult for Chinese learners to de understand and use them. The general objective of this work is to determine the most frequent errors in the comprehension of the modal and aspectual verb periphrases of the Spanish language, in a sample of Chinese speakers studying in China and Spain when they translate some into Chinese some of these verbal expressions from Spanish. The results show that these learners have a better understanding of modal verbal periphrases than aspectual ones, since Chinese has a group of verbs, through which syntactic constructions equivalent to the modal periphrases of Spanish can be formed. However, there are no peripheral structures analogous to the aspectual periphrasis of Spanish.